[Plugin] Shape Bender Beta

Dave R

Ah. Yes. Put the original shape directly above the straight line. The plugin draws the bent shape with the same offset from the arc as you have between the original shape and the straight line.

charly2008

thanks Dave,

If you place the line exactly at the origin z-axis below the shape you will not have an offset.

Charly

Chris Fullmer

Its a game of percentages. Think of the arc as being 100%. Then your straight line, however long or short it is is also 100%. And it comes down to how the component matches up to the straight line. If the straight line is drawn precisely from end to end along the component (on the red axis of course), then you could say the component sits along 100% of the straight line. Therefore when it bends, it will become 100% the lengt of the arc.

arc = 1m
line = 1m
component sits on 100% of line (therefore is 1m long)
final shape will remain 1m

arc = 1m
line = 200m
component sits on 100% of line (200m long)
final bent shape will squish down to 1m

arc = 1m
line = .5m (50% of arc length)
component sits on 100% of line (0.5m long)
final bent shape will be 1m long

Dave R

@charly2008 said:

thanks Dave,

If you place the line exactly at the origin z-axis below the shape you will not have an offset.

Charly

Exactly.

LeoZ

Hai Chris
First I must say I am impressed with your work on Sketchup. I was very enthusiastic about your Shapebender. But I stumbled on some problems with it. I tried to make a “real” metric bold; a M10. That’s a 10mm bold with a thread of 1.5 mm /turn. I wanted to use the method of “fret2424” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKrWDNDd62c )
So I started with half a circle with a radius of 5 mm and I lifted one end 0.75 mm. That is not exactly right, but it was just to try.
I got some very strange results you might like to investigate.
Perhaps I am doing something wrong, but then I would like to know what.
Thanks

The result looks like this

Chris Fullmer

My guess is that the faces are too small. You might try scaling everything up by 10 or 100, then scale it down afterwards. Can you upload the model here?

charly2008

Hi,

this is a wonderful tool. Here is a test with a wood carving model.

Charly

Chris Fullmer

That is precisely the kind of stuff I wrote this for - intricate models that need to be bent to match an actual surface. Bending detailed woodwork to match a curved piece of wood, adding signange/letters to a curving wall, etc. It is definitely a quirky plugin, but once you really get it down solid in your head the process it goes through and how to get what you want, it works pretty well. Thanks for lookig at it,

Chris

charly2008

It can also be misused for other things

LeoZ

@chris fullmer said:

My guess is that the faces are too small. You might try scaling everything up by 10 or 100, then scale it down afterwards. Can you upload the model here?

You are so right!! I drew a bolt of 10 meters and it worked fine.
The only hitch was sketchup itself. It crashed while scaling it down.
But it has a nice autosave, so ...
This was my result.
It's cool!!!

From a 10m bolt to a 10mm

This is too small to start

Chris Fullmer

You seriously made that with shape bender? Cool!

charly2008

Hi Glenn,

it doesn't work for me!.

Charly

Chris Fullmer

What scale are you worjing at there Charlie? Is that life size - so a few mm? If so, it needs to be sacled up because SketchUp does not handle small faces well.

Chris

charly2008

Hi Chris,

it was in mm's. I scaled it up, than it worked.

Charly

gullfo

@chris fullmer said:

You seriously made that with shape bender? Cool!

you see the madness you have unleashed upon us?

added my version: just create the helix and extend a triangle equal to one segment and use shape bender. follow-me doesn't give as nearly a reliable result... then scale down.
bolt using shape bender.jpg